A big new foundry project... for me, at least

I agree, it's cool how fast it works but noticeably lacks fire and loud noise. I'm a little worried I'm going to forget to turn it off...





Yeah to get started we are using extruded and our cooling system is a bucket of water or 2. He's ordering a TIG cooling system for the furnace and trying to find a cheap source of cast. There is a tire shop next door and part of it might also be becoming our machine shop, so that's only a matter of time. But it works!





Petrobond and parting arrived... But my barrel of AFS 130 green diamond sand wasn't on the truck somehow, so the wait to play with my organoclay sample continues. I'm not sure who screwed that up, the replacement for Smelko's or the trucking company. Waiting on replies to some emails to track it down.



Flasks!





Alignment pins!



Students! If you look carefully you can see the pins aren't fixed in the flasks, at least not yet. Work in progress.



Day 1 was a blast. Half of this first group (friends and family of the owner) poured too slow and their molds didn't fill, but they had a good time. The other half and everyone in the afternoon class got a decent casting to bring home. One of that second group brought his own flask and patterns.

Next time I'll remember to get some pictures of their castings...

Jeff

 

Scammed a pic from Saturday off the school's social media... This lady's mold of a dollar store apple shaped bowl turned out the best casting of the day.



I'm going in again tomorrow after work to run the melter and supervise the 2 guys who showed up for saturday's afternoon class. They got invited back for a take 2 because they finished early enough to try and get a 2nd mold done on the first day, but the cheap pump we had cooling the furnace broke down after their first pours and forced us to shut everything down. I'm told the temporary bucket of water and pump we had was replaced with a TIG cooling setup yesterday, so hopefully we'll have no more near meltdowns anytime in the near future!

Jeff

 

Fair enough. That has to be the first Instagram link request I've seen here on the forums.

https://instagram.com/vansblacksmithing

Met the rest of the Vans team tonight. 2 other blacksmithing instructors and 2 other new guys who will be running leatherworking classes. Interesting times ahead!

Jeff

 

The tilt furnace looking pic? No idea where that came from. That pic went up before the furnace arrived I think. Best guess: it came from the company that built the non-tilting unit we actually have there.

Edit - I think I had her roll the mold over so she had that core facing up when she opened the flask up, but it's hard to remember for sure since there were four of them and I was going from one to the next the whole time. Also, remember that flask is only 15cmx15cm, so that hanging core isn't as big as it may look. Plus it's brand new petrobond...

Jeff

 

One guy this week brought in his own flask and pattern, quite nice. Made himself a couple of square corner brackets for setting up wood working glue jobs. They both came out pretty nice...





He forgot his flask, but came back to get it this morning. While he was there he started asking me about homemade waste oil burners... So I asked him if he's planning to build a furnace.... Yup! Another one hooked, methinks...

He showed up to get his flask while another guy was making this bottle opener:



That guy has a friend with a CNC mill and wanted to learn how to cast copies of patterns his friend will cut. Said he's thinking about maybe buying a furnace kit off amazon.

Jeff

 

Boss was playing with his resin printer trying to come up with pop culture related patterns to bring in students.

No class tonight but I got to go in for a shift of just having fun trying to cast a bunch of stuff straight off the printer with undercuts and no draft with skinny holes through them and fat sections in places where I don't want to have to cut feeders off. He knows they will need work to make into actual patterns but wanted to actually see how close they are to being usable, not just hear it from me.

Raptor claw actually works as is.



Hand of the King pin hung onto a little sand





It's not a batarang. That would be illegal in Canada. Print is a little warped, and broke sand off just about everywhere it could! Plus the no draft and skinny holes thing.





Flip-up cover for a light switch so you can feel like you are launching a missile. Again no draft.





Starship Voyager has undercuts and a hard to feed fat section





...And a new knob for the drill press in the blacksmith shop downstairs.



Well, that was fun! Hopefully the tire shop next door will get some cracked wheels for us soon - all we have there is extruded for now.

Jeff

 

Good suggestions guys. And yes, we had fun!

Although the little induction furnace likes to overheat the cooling water and put itself on pause mid melt sometimes, bit of a pain when it happens. We'll figure out a solution, whether it's some sort of refrigeration or adding antifreeze or a bigger reservoir or whatever.

I'm not complaining but rocco was right before - it's not quite the same with no fire.

I'm hoping when he finds a new spot for his "heritage" school (coal forges), he'll want to set up a second foundry there where we can do bigger stuff. If he can burn coal there he can burn propane and oil, right?

Canadian anti-ninja star laws, mostly. That and we aren't sharpening them...

Jeff

 

So we're going to be setting up another foundry at the school's huge new "heritage" (coal forge) blacksmithing location in Hawkesbury, just over on the Quebec side of the Ottawa river.

It will have a larger, propane fired furnace and bigger (wooden) flasks. How much bigger? I'm not sure. He pointed to one of my A70's and said "I want to be able to pour one of those"... Then a few days later he sent me a link and asked for an opinion on a $600 ToAuto furnace that appears to be built for use with an A8 (with no plinth?!) and comes with the usual unsuitable tweezer tongs for rim-gripping a crucible etc. It has a castable recractory hot face but an unsealed kaowool lid with no rigidizer or coating product supplied. I might have to beg him to let me build something better (but the new location is supposed to open June 1)... and/or maybe loan him one of my furnaces til we can find a good solution he's willing to pay for. I think he is worried about the insurance man not liking homemade gear... maybe they would be ok with a devil forge burner but I don't see how that is actually any safer than a homemade Reil burner or a Moya like the ones I use here. Bill J's old Wayne and Forge Company furnace isn't homemade and can fit the A70. It also has the safety certified burner train and control panel, but I'm not ready to give that up... Yeah it has eaten up half my casting shed and almost 3/4 of my other shed, but at least half the reason I'm working with the school in the first place is to save up for a bigger shed where I can actually run that stuff!

The little induction melter will melt bronze but more than half of the crucible full seems to be beyond what it can handle. The crucible only seems to get glowing hot down at the bottom half of it, presumably where the coil is located. We're also having issues even with aluminum where the furnace will overheat (we think) and power itself off for a minute, then back on, lather rinse repeat. At least with aluminum it seems to get a little hotter each time it powers on, so eventually it does get up to pouring temp and beyond. All this despite a couple of upgrades to the cooling system. Adding a fan to the part of the unit where the refractory and coil are housed as well seems to have improved it a bit but we are still seemingly limited to just really small stuff with bronze.

Before we even tried melting bronze the owner said he wants to offer bronze axe classes... Handed me a (small enough to fit the 15x15cm flasks) steel axe head that they make in one of the blacksmithing classes. "Can you cast this?"

I explained to him about the eye of the axe head needing a coreprint and corebox, and that a split pattern would be better, especially for beginners. But in his head more pieces = more complicated.

"Well a 1 piece pattern and no eye would mean having to ram up a false cope then doing some coping down, which is actually a fair bit more complicated than using a split pattern. It makes more fiddly work to mold it, and a lot more cleanup for the students afterwards. I *could* fill in the eye with sand and cast it solid, but that is going to cause more shrinkage. We'll need to use a bigger feeder so we may not have the capacity to melt that much bronze... And drilling a 7/8" eye through an inch or so of aluminum bronze to make an eye won't be any fun". I also pointed out that a core that short could just be made out of petrobond, no separate core sand or special binders needed. How much simpler could you want?

He had me cast one solid off the one piece steel axe head anyhow. He got less than a 1/4" deep hole drilled starting with a 1/4" bit before he gave up on drilling out the eye and let me do this:





Got a sample casting made in aluminum. Came out well enough that I cast the first of 6 patterns in aluminum for a class.









Then I tried casting one in bronze. That is when we hit the issue with trying to get a full crucible of bronze melted. We've already cracked one crucible due to the on/off melt/freeze cycling and even with the new cooling fan I started to have issues keeping it molten once it was merely half full. I had to dip a bronze rod into the melt and let some barely molten bronze freeze onto it a couple times to reduce the volume in the crucible then pour as soon as it was all melted before it shut itself down again. I think it was a little cold, but I know it poured short.



I can still grind a working axe out of it to sell at our comicon booth in september, but bronze axe classes aren't happening at the Ottawa school as things stand. But the good news is, when we offer the classes at the new Hawkesbury school we'll be able to make some that aren't so itty bitty. And swords! Til then I'll keep working on him to let me make split patterns or cast some match plates...

Jeff

 

Got these done too, they'll soon be hung up in the classrooms...









I think I posted that last pic before, in Denis' thread about how rap on patterns with text on them properly. Worked like a charm!

Got some great tips from HT1's recent plaque video too for the finishing work. I had to make do with an angle grinder flap disc and hand sanding but the laquer thinner trick worked great! What would I do without you guys?





Jeff